Black Lightning is a Russian superhero film about a Moscow University student who discovers that his otherwise unremarkable car can fly. After his father is attacked, he decides to use the car to fight crime and becomes the city's defender against an evil millionaire.
Lena Yartseva is a Moscow school girl. She has a typical family of modest means. Lena loves to dream of a good life and a lot of time in the nearby shopping center, where is her realm of dreams, and the mirror looks at her reflection – usually clad girls. Too much of a difference between her parents’ wishes and possibilities. Perfectionism, anger, temper originate Lena quarrels with his parents and leaves the house.
Vadim Yershov has lost everything he had: family, home, favorite job. His daughter is attached to a wheel-chair after an accident that happened partly by his fault. From this stress, Vadim accumulated so much negative energy that now he can literally kill by his word and look. A big-scale scammer Avenir decides to use Vadim's gift in his interest, offering help with medical treatment for his daughter. Through Avenir, Vadim meets with a wonderful woman named Yelena. His love to her helps him to cure his daughter and his own soul.
The student, Rifle, has managed to seduce his professor's wife, Bomber, an average working guy, has bought a factory and Bullet, the casino lover, is hiding from creditors. They all share a common path and conscription. In the army they teach you that everything must be smart and in order - cockades, straps and all, otherwise you're not fit to call yourself a person, you're a maggot. For a real man, there's no better place than the army.
Karen Shakhnazarov’s surreal satire of Communism follows an Everyman engineer named Varakin who arrives in a remote city where nothing quite makes sense, but everyone acts as if it does. He’s quickly drawn into the investigation of the suicide (or possibly murder?) of a local restaurant chef, Nikolaev – who may (or may not) be Varakin’s missing father. The more complex and absurdist the mystery becomes, the more poignant and plaintive Varakin’s predicament – “I have to get back to Moscow,” he pleads to no avail. Along the way we’re treated to a bizarre and wonderful sideshow of non sequiturs out of a Wes Anderson film, including an underground museum filled with a thousand years of real and imagined Russian history (“Here’s the pistol with which Urusov shot the False Dimitry II.”) Frozen in time, frozen far beneath the surface, the waxwork figures are strangely beautiful and forlorn, like Shakhnazarov’s marvelous and enigmatic satire of Soviet bureaucracy.
